1. INTRODUCTION
Throughout human history, from the simplest to the most complex organizations, we have encountered struggles for rights. We live in the Age of Rights proposed by Bobbio (2004), but not necessarily in their effectiveness. And the various global social movements are largely responsible for the (re)construction of new realities that have been shaped throughout history. The world today is acclaimed by the countless movements that aim to implement, protect, and enforce rights, often essential ones. The National Movement of Recyclable Material Collectors was founded with this purpose and aims, at its core, to give visibility to a marginalized workforce, dismissed as true invisible human capital. The right to sustainable emancipation (social, economic, and ecological) is the guiding principle of ethical relations, in an environment in which the subject is only recognized as a citizen if they are a participant and, consequently, an accomplice in the process of production, consumption, and propagation of the capitalist system's surplus.
This study assumes that Environmental Law, the Right to the City, and Human Rights are connected and that, therefore, systemic problems require sustainable solutions that stem from environmental education and awareness-raising. It is impossible to discuss sustainable societies without environmental justice, just as it is impossible to discuss environmental justice without seriously discussing environmental racism. And the current state of environmental illiteracy in society is the cause of the social vulnerability that affects these waste pickers and, consequently, their families. (LUZ, 2019, A-3). The challenge is undoubtedly achieving sustainable social justice that is different from the current dialectical paradigm: "for those involved in the production and consumption process: everything; for those living on the margins of society—alienated from protective policies: the void." (CAVALCANTI; SILVA, 2019, p. A-3)
This study investigates the (in)(ex)clusion of recyclable material collectors, vulnerable disposables in light of human (un)sustainability in a society moving towards the zero waste mechanism.[1]. Based on the concept of the term, the objective is to discuss the extent to which this (apparently) more sustainable innovation is ethical and efficient from the perspective of social inclusion, rather than simply a process of automating the waste industry to dispose of vulnerable people. The proposal analyzes the theoretical metamorphosis and (un)sustainable social emancipation of waste pickers in light of the vision of the category's (pseudo)evolution beyond survival in a zero-waste society.
Thus, this work is subdivided into three parts. The first part offers conceptual and historical foundations of the National Solid Waste Policy and the National Movement of Recyclable Material Collectors and their relationship with the main characters in this story: the collectors. Thus, it will analyze how the activity of collectors has been institutionalized in Brazil as a social, economic, environmental, and political practice, according to mechanisms that guarantee their invisibility in society. To this end, it aims to demonstrate what occurs in the state of numbness of a category when a blind herd is led to the slaughterhouse unaware of the path it takes, driven like a maneuverable mass through the labyrinth of history.
The second part will demonstrate the informality of the waste pickers' work and their (surreal) dream of transforming the landfill into entrepreneurship, as well as the (pseudo)contribution promoted by the National Movement of Recyclable Materials Collectors (MNCR) to the process of empowerment and emancipation of waste pickers. This chapter will demonstrate whether the social organization of recyclable material collectors contributes to reducing social invisibility through the construction of their identities, self-esteem, and sense of belonging by enabling the coordination of their collective actions, in which they are engaged, allowing them to recognize themselves as the masters of their own destinies. And as these engagement activities unfold, the demands of these demands generate socio-environmental conflicts of interest between waste pickers, cooperatives, recycling companies, the state, and civil society. The same chapter will demonstrate the social, legal, political, and economic fallacy that transforms waste pickers into mere disposable commodities like garbage.
Finally, the third part will demonstrate the process of (ex)inclusion in the (in)formal labor market, discussing the (im)possibility of (re)building a truly sustainable society based on the recognition of ethical and moral subjects and the valorization of human capital. It will demonstrate the presence of waste pickers in the digital age and provide examples of existing technological mechanisms, analyzing the extent to which the Cataki app and the Pimpmycarroça organization provide socioeconomic improvements to registered waste pickers and contribute to their (un)sustainable emancipation process.
In conclusion, the aim is to demonstrate the importance of the reciprocal responsibility of the State, civil society, and individuals immersed in the illusion of a fetishistic spectacle society, a product of capital's system of social reproduction, which transforms everything into a commodity. And parallel to the labyrinthine tangle of this plot, the guiding thread emerges as the recognition that everything is merely a historical process, and therefore changeable, and that the awakening of a new worldview through a sustainable emancipatory adventure seems (im)possible. To this end, the methodology was based on a review of national and international literature and their respective concrete social and historical cases.
2. THE MOVEMENT OF A WAVE: EVERY SHELL COUNTS IN THE SEA OF TRASH
Just as the wave returns to the infinite ocean, all waste generated by each human being should return to the production chain to become organic raw materials or to generate new products for industry. And in this reverse logistics process proposed by the solid waste law, each piece of waste counts, as it always means one less piece of waste disposed of in places unsuitable for recycling. Recycling presupposes selective collection. And selective collection in Brazil, for decades, has been carried out informally by independent collectors.
The category of waste pickers who survive on waste is not new in Brazil. They were present in the 1947 account of poet Manuel Bandeira, when he wrote "O Bicho" (The Animal) to denounce people in the underworld of food scrap scavenging (Bandeira, 1993). However, the poet's characters were not recyclable material pickers. They were at the height of precarious lives (Butler, 2016), searching for food, not recyclables to resell as merchandise. The activity of collecting food and recyclable materials to survive was portrayed in Brazil by Marcos Prado in the documentary "Estamira" (2004). This documentary tells the story of an invisible woman who scavenges for her dreams and meaning in life in the dump. However, living with dignity from garbage in precarious working conditions, without housing, and without inclusion in the waste management process seems like an unsustainable and utopian emancipation.
Grossi's (2003) study conducts an ethnography of waste pickers and demonstrates that many perceive themselves as part of the garbage, revealing depreciative feelings and low self-esteem cultivated by the elite itself through "hatred of the poor" (Souza, 2017). For Pereira and Goes (2016), workers who work in the collection of recyclable materials are perceived as vagrants or delinquents, and these representations possibly result from a lack of interest in understanding the situation of the category and, consequently, in seeking to change this reality.
In 2010, Law 12305/2010 established the National Solid Waste Policy (PNRS), guided by its eighth principle, which affirms reusable and recyclable solid waste as an economic asset with social value, generating jobs and income, and also promoting citizenship. The PNRS addresses the activities performed by recyclable material collectors as fundamental to the proper management of solid waste, as they collect discarded material, which can be reused in the production process, reducing the use of new natural resources. Collectors contribute to recycling, and it is necessary to introduce new concepts of social and economic appreciation for this professional category, ensuring sustainable production and consumption patterns.
It is worth noting that since October 9, 2002, the occupation of recyclable material collector has been regulated by Ordinance No. 397, in the Brazilian Classification of Occupations (CBO). This profession is recognized by the Ministry of Labor and Employment, which describes its activities as those that contribute to increasing the useful life of landfills and reducing the demand for natural resources, as it supplies recycling industries for the reinsertion of waste into their own or other production chains. These activities can be performed individually or collectively, preferably organized into cooperatives/associations.
Despite this legislative recognition, it failed to prevent the activity from continuing to be stigmatized and discriminated against by the society of the spectacle. Given their social invisibility, there is a lack of registration data for the category. However, a brief look at the literature, articles, and periodicals reveals that the majority of waste pickers are women and have low levels of education. Therefore, this analysis focuses on women waste pickers.
The debate on the development of public policy projects, particularly in the social sphere, often focuses on the unilateral role of the state, as the sole responsible party and provider, legally endowed with resources for this purpose. A question arises: how can organizations and citizens participate in the process of developing and implementing political and social projects, especially in the implementation of the growing zero-waste philosophy around the world?
While the debate over how these projects should be developed continues, the National Movement of Recyclable Material Collectors (MNCR) denounces a lack of support from the government, businesses, and society. June 7th is celebrated as National Recyclable Material Collectors' Day, but workers in this sector have had little to celebrate, and many of them are not even aware of the movement that represents them due to a lack of belonging to their own profession. The MNCR believes that the deadline for the profession to be recognized and valued is still far away.
3. FROM THE DARKNESS OF THE DUMP TO THE FETISH OF THE LIGHT OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN GLOBALIZATION 4.0
The "strugglers," in the words of Jessé and Nozaki (2017), are the invisible sub-citizens who lack self-esteem and self-confidence. Cardoso (2010), discussing the Antisocial State, analyzed how manual labor has historically been viewed as degraded by the elites. Waste pickers are, by analogy, criminalized by the state, inheriting the hatred and contempt once accorded to slaves. Today, waste pickers are the slaves who manage the waste of everything that seemingly no longer serves society but, paradoxically, is valuable for maintaining the cycle of capital consumption.
Capital extracts its raw materials from the environment without any beneficial return, as its main focus is the production of more money. Thus, recycling emerges for capital with the clear purpose of profit: the consumed and discarded commodity is reused when returned to the industry as recyclable raw material that will be transformed into new commodities in an extremely profitable cycle. In this cycle, the use of the waste picker's labor force maintains profits for the capitalist system and legitimizes it.
In this system described above, the hard-working waste picker is exploited threefold: by capital, by the state, and by the individual who improperly disposes of her waste. Once inserted into informality, the waste picker is forced to sell what she finds at inhumane prices, while the middleman buys from the waste picker and passes the merchandise on to industry. If we analyze use value and exchange value, the recyclable item once again becomes a use value once it returns to the production cycle as a new commodity. Without realizing it, the waste picker is a co-participant in the urban cleanup process, which is the responsibility of the municipality (state), as well as in the capitalist production process. However, this important environmental agent is not recognized as an employee of either the state or capital. In other words, they find themselves in a kind of limbo. As Mota states, "the street worker embodies in his activity a labor that is doubly exploited, by recycling companies and by the state itself" (2002, p. 14). And to complete the triad, the waste collector is also exploited by the waste-generating consumer, since the latter sees the collector as an opportunity to get rid of the weight of something that is useless to them and also to do charity by donating the waste to someone who makes a living collecting the luxury that environmental illiterates call trash.
Amid these social transformations of work, especially among waste pickers, literature and research have portrayed a growing number of socially excluded individuals. Some authors consider social inclusion based on unemployment. In other words, being unemployed is being excluded from the system. However, are waste pickers who work in inhumane conditions included simply because they earn an income? In 2003, the federal government created the Social Inclusion Committee for Waste Pickers, whose main responsibility was to implement projects that sought to guarantee dignified conditions for waste pickers. For Miura (2004), the biggest issue at the time was not professional recognition, but rather ensuring humane working conditions beyond mere survival. Paradoxically, even in the face of so many deplorable and inhumane conditions, waste picking provides the (survival) of more than 600,000 Brazilians, according to data from the Ministry of Culture (MNCR) and IPEA (2016). This constitutes a large “industrial reserve army”, a growing wave of a “relative overpopulation of workers”, because according to Marx this avalanche of workers would be without fixed employment, but would be an integral part of the capitalist system (1988).
From the perspective of structuring and seeking to improve working conditions, and in the absence of government support and visibility, waste pickers end up submitting to recycling cooperatives that offer a higher price for their product, better cleaning conditions, and workplace safety. However, informality has common traits such as a lack of labor rights, flexible working hours, etc. In the case of waste pickers, what is considered informal or illegal was legalized through the creation of cooperatives (Piccinini, 2004), as they are exempt from various labor charges. According to Marx, "current cooperative and (associative) societies only have value insofar as they are independent creations, created by workers, and are protected neither by governments nor by the bourgeoisie" (2001, p. 120). The development of a sense of belonging to a collective category of workers occurs through the collector's awareness of their importance. As OFFE (1984) states, the original power relationship can only be felt once these associations or cooperatives are able to form a collective identity. In other words, to truly achieve sustainable emancipation of collectors in a consumer society, it would be necessary to establish cooperatives with a genuine sense of cooperation and in line with the basic philosophy of the national movement: "from collector to collector."
In a fetishistic capitalist society, workers identify as consumers before even feeling like citizens. According to the commodity fetish, it is the thing that conveys value to human beings, not the other way around. Therefore, garbage is not given due importance, as it lacks status appreciation and neither use nor exchange value, since environmentally illiterates mistakenly view garbage as an object that was once a commodity and has neither value nor price.
Thus, earning an income from waste, even in degrading work, is a way to feel part of capitalist society. But then, what does it mean to be human in the modern system of social (re)production of capital? In analogy, the waste picker used as an allegory for analysis needs to be solvent to be considered human. This is the paradox of human rights presented by Kurz (2003): to be considered human, the waste picker needs income to become a consumer and co-participant in the capitalist system that enslaves her, keeping her under the ecological fetish of environmental agents, when in fact she is nothing more than puppets of the system of capital reproduction. And the sequence of the (pseudo)evolution of the waste picker's emancipatory adventure is to become an entrepreneur. The state of numbness created by social changes, according to capital's strategy to maintain power, instills in informal workers the illusory fallacy of feeling like entrepreneurs. It turns out that this feeling, instead of strengthening the waste picker category, causes a weakening of identification with the class, since in practice the subordination of labor remains, because even when self-employed or inserted in the predatory and precarious market, their labor capital is inserted into the logic of capital. For Tavares (2002, p. 113), "the strategy is to transform workers into small entrepreneurs."
Amid so many contradictions and positions of pseudo-freedom, improvement, and independence that bring down a house of cards built in a fantasy world, Castel (1998, p. 430) states that the "new relationship between increased wages, increased production, and increased consumption." These transformations undergone by contemporary society, reflected in the daily lives of vulnerable individuals like waste pickers, are not truly emancipatory social transformations from a sustainable perspective. On the one hand, they increase poverty, social inequality, the precariousness of labor relations, and the rise of informality subsidized by growth disguised as development (Furtado, 2002), increasing possibilities for consumption, knowledge, and technology. It is clear how the sustainable (pseudo-)emancipatory development of a category can be permeated by a contradictory and dialectical process.
In parallel, but not far from this cycle, with investment and advancements in technology, the 4.0 revolution has seen a significant increase in participatory actions related to innovation and social technologies, associations, institutional cooperation, and volunteering, aimed at increasing well-being and giving visibility to the work of waste pickers. Among these new technologies has emerged the Cataki mobile app.[2], whose idea has been around since 2013, aims to find independent collectors of recyclable materials, facilitating their proper disposal while generating income for these professionals. The challenge is enormous, as this is an app created to reach an audience that, for the most part, is offline and therefore requires the user to be fully useful. According to the app's description, "Cataki is an open and optimistic experiment (…), a political tool," intended to generate more income and increase recycling rates, "but above all, to fight for decent work." One of the questions the app poses is why valuable materials are still buried in landfills? Why are those who practice sustainability still marginalized? The app encourages a collection program operated by waste pickers and mediated by technology. All openly and with user collaboration. The Cataki app is linked to Pimp My Carroça.[3], a movement that fights for recognition for recyclable material collectors through artistic activism. Since 2012, the project has been present in at least 42 cities in 12 countries, with the engagement of nearly 2,000 volunteers and 750 artists, supporting the work of more than 850 collectors.
Given the lack of public infrastructure for selective waste collection in Brazilian cities, the app was created to meet the demand of people who want to recycle but find no alternatives. Cataki allows users to directly contact a waste picker, theoretically without any intermediaries. Users view the profile of the nearest recycling professional and negotiate pickup and payment, presumably directly with the waste picker. The current criticism is that because the app is open, it's unclear whether the registered users are middlemen or waste pickers. The second criticism stems from the ecological fetish, since once a customer contacts a waste picker through the app, many still don't pay the waste picker for collection, as if their waste were a donation or a favor to the waste picker. The question that remains at the beginning of the 4.0 revolution in the world of waste pickers is to what extent the app will be able to continue its work on behalf of waste pickers, given that it has already opened registrations for cooperatives. Will the future of Cataki be an Uber for waste? Only time will tell what will happen, especially for waste pickers, throughout the 4.0 revolution. Will the cycle from waste picker to cooperative member and entrepreneur 4.0 be a truly sustainable path of inclusion and emancipation, or a step backward for humanity?
4. CONCLUSION
At the end of this analysis, we can hopefully conclude, as does David Harvey (2014), that urban social movements are underway. The reflections presented here lead us to Bobbio's thinking in his work *The Age of Rights*, when he states that human rights are systematically violated by men themselves in their solemn declarations that remain almost always, and almost everywhere, dead letters (Bobbio, 2004). This leads to the following conclusion: the fundamental problem regarding the right to sustainable emancipation of luxury waste pickers is not so much the recognition of their importance, but rather the redefinition of what is understood as garbage, waste. The educational process of sustainable emancipation needs to be joint and simultaneous for both the waste pickers and the population to separate recyclable materials. And for this change to occur, it is necessary, in the words of Migueles (2004), that society perceives the waste picker as 'just another worker', correlating them with positive aspects. After all, the way society views waste influences its view of those who work with waste. If this isn't the case, then why seek meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world, devoid of reason and recognition of the other as an ethical and moral subject?
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[1]The Zero Waste Concept, as established by the Zero Waste International Alliance (ZWIA), consists of maximizing the use and proper disposal of recyclable and organic waste. This involves reducing, or even eliminating, the sending of these materials to landfills or incineration. Zero Waste, therefore, is an ethical, economic, efficient, and visionary goal to encourage people to change their lifestyles in order to encourage sustainable natural cycles, where all materials are designed to allow for recovery and post-consumer use (see http://zwia.org/).
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